Analyses of God beliefs, atheism, religion, faith, miracles, evidence for religious claims, evil and God, arguments for and against God, atheism, agnosticism, the role of religion in society, and related issues.

Sunday, December 28, 2008

The Reformed Epistemology movement has constructed an elaborate explanation of how they think God beliefs are justified. In short, RE believers claim to have a direct immediate access to God through a witness of the holy spirit, religious experience, or sensus divinitatus. What’s important about this new source of knowledge is that it is private, it cannot be refuted by any contrary evidence, indeed, it rejects evidence altogether. This path to God is direct and veridical—without mistakes or confusions.

Here it is in William Lane Craig’s words:

Plantinga's model involves crucially what is usually called the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. In his model the Holy Spirit functions on the analogy of a cognitive faculty, producing beliefs in us. I myself prefer to think of the Spirit's witness either as a form of literal testimony or else as part of the experiential circumstances which serve to ground belief in God and the great truths of the Gospel. In either case His deliverances are properly basic. By that I mean that the experience of the Holy Spirit is veridical and unmistakable (though not necessarily irresistible or indubitable) for him who has it; that such a person does not need supplementary arguments or evidence in order to know and to know with confidence that he is in fact experiencing the Spirit of God; that such experience does not function in this case as a premise in any argument from religious experience to God, but rather is the immediate experiencing of God himself; that in certain contexts the experience of the Holy Spirit will imply the apprehension of certain truths of the Christian religion, such as "God exists," "I am condemned by God," "I am reconciled to God," "Christ lives in me," and so forth; that such an experience provides one not only with a subjective assurance of Christianity's truth, but with objective knowledge of that truth; and that arguments and evidence incompatible with that truth are overwhelmed by the experience of the Holy Spirit for him who attends fully to it.

After they argued that classical foundationalism was dead because it couldn’t how its basic principles were known: “Only those beliefs that we apprehend clearly and distinctly are true.” itself was challenged. Is knowing that principle itself something we apprehend clearly and distinctly? Or through justification? The idea behind RE was that we could apprehend more things directly and know them than just Descartes list of internal thoughts. When I see a flower, I am immediately aware of its title, and of its beauty. When it appears to me that the person I am talking to is angry, that’s something I know without any inference or reasoning. I know it directly and immediately.

How is it that they come to the confident conclusion that the deliverances of the holy spirit are veridical, objective knowledge? Because of features of the experiences themselves. The testimony of the Holy Spirit confronts them directly and does not misled them, they say. And the experience itself is so powerful, it eclipses whatever power to raise doubts some other ideas might have had. This internal source of knowledge of God gives the believer perfect assurance that any possible defeater that comes up is mistaken.

The RE development represents a retreat away from classic attempts to prove God’s existence on independent, non-circular, inter-subjectively verifiable grounds. The Holy Spirit has given this Christian the perfect answer to everything. The voices are internal and private. But what they instruct is without any doubt because the feelings are intense and authentic and unmistakable feeling. And the feelings give me perfect unassailable assurance that no matter what sort of counter evidence I encounter, it must be wrong. I have an internal, self-authenticating source of knowledge that cannot be mistaken.

There are a lot of objections to make to this sort of view. First, presumably even the RE adherent would admit that not all of the strong, passionate feelings like this that people have are authentic, even some of the ones where the subject is convinced that the experience is real, veridical, and religiously significant. They must be willing to admit that there are some false religious experiences that feel similarly compelling. If not, then they’d have to accept that all of the powerful, spiritual experiences that people have had count equally as objective knowledge. The problem is that too many people have had too many experiences like this that produce beliefs that are blatantly contradictory. They can’t all be correct. And surely the RE advocate wants to have some ground from which to argue that the Zoroastrians and the Palugans are wrong when they directly experience their gods. So the question is how does one tell the difference between the authentic visions and the bogus ones? Especially if the bogus ones are insisting that there’s are authentic just as vigorously.

Second, how can any mere feeling inside one’s own head be sufficient to give you a defeater for any possible counter evidence that comes along? Mere feelings in the head that are not manifest as objects in the world are notoriously subjective and unreliable. You can’t trust your strong feelings to tell you the truth about the world. And the only way we’ve ever had to check those feelings is to go look and confirm or disconfirm whether it was there. Cross-checking outside the voices in the my head, especially with other observers are the only or at least the best method we’ve ever had for separating the true from the false. It’s patently contrary to a thousand lessons every one of us has learned the hard way in our daily lives where the thing that felt sooo right in our minds turned out to be completely off the mark.

Third, consider the bigger picture here. There are millions of Christians and born-again evangelical Christians in the United States who wield enormous political, social, and economic power. They battle to set our school agendas, they put politicians into office, they vote for social agendas, and they propagate their ideas to the next generation of Americans. And here we are being told that ultimately the source of justification they have for their entire ideology is a set of intense, undeniable feelings they have in their minds. Furthermore, these ideas cannot be challenged (or even experienced) by anyone on the outside. In principle, they cannot be defeated because the feelings themselves inform the feeler that nothing else is so true or trustworthy.

The problem, obviously, is that the ideology has co-opted the RE’s capacity to think straight. Their dedication to the ideology has eclipsed all other concerns, even the person’s capacity to reason. Once someone is this far gone, the rest of us can only hope that the voices in their heads don’t start telling them to strap on a dynamite backpack or try to hasten the apocalypse by instigating World War 3.

9 comments:

"The problem, obviously, is that the ideology has co-opted the RE’s capacity to think straight. Their dedication to the ideology has eclipsed all other concerns, even the person’s capacity to reason. Once someone is this far gone, the rest of us can only hope that the voices in their heads don’t start telling them to strap on a dynamite backpack or try to hasten the apocalypse by instigating World War 3"

There is some truth to this. In America there seem to be more wacko people than other places: killing people in Walmart stampedes, St. Claus shooting people to death, etc. We watch this and think: only in the United States of America.

Also, there are plenty of Christians in America and other places who watch the televangelists and charlatans with great horror and disgust. A lot of this needs reigning in.

Also, a purely subjective religion is indeed stupid. It is dumb to be told by someone that your faith is purely "intellectual". In fact, man is a complete being: intellect and subject belong together. Yet, people have varying degrees of one and the other and some have limited capacity and that's ok, too.

Yet, it is somewhat hysterical (by you) to keep warning about people starting WW 3, as you can see nobody has done it yet, and most likely WW 3 will start in India/Pakistan (see Gwen Dyer). Ezra Levant, (see his blog from my blog, or google him), a Canadian Jew, who keeps getting hauled in front of the Canadian Human Rights commission for insulting Islam, has pointed out, no matter how much some Muslims complain about blasphemy committed, supposedly, by other groups (Levant calls this: soft Jihad), in actual reality, violence has been committed against his synagogue in Edmonton, and nothing against Muslims. It is just a lot of noise.

If someone says "I have private knowledge which can never be questioned", what is one going to say in response?

I was discussing atheism/theism with a friend of mine, and he stops the conversation and tells me (this is a paraphrase): "A friend of mine told me they saw an angel. They couldn't tell me more about it, but it was someone I trust implicitly, and I know they'd never tell me something that wasn't true. In light of that, even though I do have some of the same questions, I find it hard to doubt".

Isn't that the essence of RE? I know something, and even though you don't, go ahead and trust me? One possible answers is that people from many belief systems have RE experiences, and we know some of the things that cause these experiences to occur. However, it's awfully difficult to articulate this as a response.

I think that one response has got to be that we insist on making this distinction. We've all been clear since Plato (Gettier aside) that in order to have knowledge that some proposition p, she must have a justified, true belief that p. If you see what you take to be an angel, you might come to believe "Angels exist." (Although I will argue that people's introspective reports of what they believe are significantly unreliable.) But the RE can't just declare this to be knowledge on the basis that it feels really, really intense or seems veridical. Whether or not it is true that angels exist is still an open question. And even worse, having these private feelings that cannot be subjected to any sort of cross checking, corroboration or falsification does not constitute justification. (Plantinga's got a very fancy, long winded, and ultimately bogus answer to that problem.) So the person you're talking to is far from having knowledge. He hasn't met 2 of the 3 necessary conditions of knowledge. We've got to be vigilant about the sneaky slip they're making from talking about having an experience that they believe was of angels or God, and then calling that knowledge.

RE may be crap, and irrational, but we need to remember that the belief in rationaliy is itself not rational. If A is better than B andB is better than C, then A is better than C. But how do you decide if A is better than B.

There are many ways for someone to reach the stage where they "strap on a backpack". Some have reasoned there way there, others have accepted anothers view that it is the right thing to do, and still others are following their own inner voice.

What weight should a person give to his own experiences and convictions?

I really have to say, when it comes to stupid kinds of inferences or arguments, which is really what drives me to debate anyone, this private knowledge claim some people (religious or not) are willing to retreat to demonstrates a complete apathy when it comes to any kind of intellectual thought. Two things you say about it come to mind.

You mention,

How is it that they come to the confident conclusion that the deliverances of the holy spirit are veridical, objective knowledge? Because of features of the experiences themselves. (emphasis added)

Notice that the justification comes from outside of the argument itself. The argument is like that of some Platonic intuition, which just comes as justified in itself. Unlike intuition of that sort, which is true of its own accord, the real justification of why this "Spirit intuition" is correct is not because of the Spirit.

To make that more clear, it is the like the difference between saying

(i) (God is real) is correct because God tells me so, and

(ii) (God is real is correct) because God tells me so.

To make it more symbolic: "X is true because of Y" versus "(X is true) is true because of Y"

If the Holy Spirit were the justification for why the Holy Spirit saying God is real were the case, we'd be appealing to statement (ii). However, as your quote alludes to, we are dealing with (i). They look the same, but the reason those who accept the Holy Spirit as justification enough for their belief stems not from the Holy Spirit. We might, then, add to (i) to make it say:

[(God is real) is correct because of the Holy Spirit] because of the experiences.

But what does this tell us? It tells us that we are making an empirical claim about our experiences about the force of the Holy Spirit that are "good enough" justification, which come as immediately correct. These experiences really must lead us to one of who exclusive ontological choices. Either monism or dualism.

The religious person accepting this private knowledge argument will have to reject monism if there is to be anything "special" about the Holy Spirit which makes it stand apart from other kinds of scrutiny (and evidence). If we accepted monism, then the experiences regarding the Spirit will be under the same kind of (naturalist) empirical scrutiny we give anything in science. The experiences we be of the same "kind" or "sort" that all other experiences and empirical claims are. If that is the case, then one needs to offer more justification, with an almost scientific framework, to say how it is that the Spirit is so "veridical and unmistakable." I would say such an argument is next to impossible and will never come about, and it completely weakens the use of the Spirit. Therefore, monism will have to be rejected.

Since the (only?) other alternative will be to embrace a dualism which makes the experiences regarding the Holy Spirit manifestly different from the rest of our experiences of the world, it comes as self-assuring that anyone accepting this "private knowledge" argument will not be swayed by any evidence. It isn't so much that they will say "my 'proof' of God is immediately true and apparent because of Him." That is just a feature of the "Spirit experiences." But what separates those "Spirit experiences" from the rest of our empirical knowledge is the implicit ontological acceptance that "These experiences are characteristically different from every other natural experience."

You also add in, Matt, that,

Mere feelings in the head that are not manifest as objects in the world are notoriously subjective and unreliable.

I don't think it is as simple as just being subjective and unreliable. One can easily argue that we might have a completely reliable private knowledge in some conceivable world, and being subjective is far from making the information worthless; e.g., I might have mere subjective reasons and feelings why not to go down some dark ally in the city, and it might be a reliable way to save my skin, so to speak, but it doesn't manifest anything objective about why my behind is still intact (one can obviously argue counterfactual problems with our lack of knowledge here, but ignoring that for the moment). Does this subjective and possibly reliable feeling come as problematic, which appears implied in your statement? I would say no.

The real ontological issue is that they are not just missing the objective. Hell, they are technically missing the subjective, too (though, any kind of argument for it will unmistakably aim at its qualification over any objective criteria). The reason is, as I argued above, they must be accepting that we have two manifestly different worlds we are dealing with. What is "objective" in your natural world is not the "objective" of their (I would argue wholly exclusive) God world, which is full of spirits, angels, souls and what not.

To end this here, I will simply say that I would accept, and argue on another day, the bold claim that all forms of dualism are not only incompatible with naturalism, but all forms of dualism are wrong. Dualism is an unjustified metaphysics of the reality we live in, and even if there were such a dualist reality some skeptic might claim, such that we live in The Matrix, then we still have no justifiable or ontologically necessary reason to bring up the alternative from the "Matrix reality" we do live in and validate. They are still mutually exclusive.

Therefore, anyone accepting this Reformed Epistemology where private knowledge, especially of the sort indicative of absolute certainty coming as intuitively and immediately correct by the mere force of the Holy Spirit, requires that the person also accept metaphysical dualism and view the world wholly different from any kind of counter evidence we might even appeal to. They simply will not have an accurate perception of the world; to make any argument, the person accepting RE must first justify their dualist presumptions or show how we can have one reality with two very different empirical justifications for one kind of (ontological) experience.

I just finished reading Plantinga's "Warranted Christian Belief", and I think he is approaching the subject from a different angle than Craig.

Plantinga does not set RE forward as an "argument" for religious belief. The point is that if Christianity is true, then something very much like the Sensus Divinatatus will be true. Plantinga was defending the Christian against the de jure objection to religous belief, but he admits that if the de facto objection holds, then religious belief does not have warrant. On the other hand, if religious belief is true, it most likely has warrant (in Plantinga's externalist account).

Plantinga also thinks that arguments for God's existence are valuable, and valid.

An example of his use of argument is his development of an argument that seeks to show naturalism is self-referentially incoherent.

I think this is more or less right, Reformed Baptist. Thanks. I shouldn't run Craig and Plantinga together. P is definitely more restrained about 1) the evidentialist force of the sensus divinitatus and 2) the strong conclusion that objective, veridical knowledge is produced.

Bravo! I am someone who regards her inner spiritual experience as just that--an inner experience. I have come to the conclusion that to expect anyone else to give any validity to it would be absurd and abusive.

That's why I regard all organized religions (and especially the variety in political power today in the U.S.) as ipso facto absurd and abusive.

My book is out:

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Atheism

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Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Rochester. Teaching at CSUS since 1996. My main area of research and publication now is atheism and philosophy of religion. I am also interested in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and rational decision theory/critical thinking.

Quotes:

"Science. It works, bitches."

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." - Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

"Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry for ever and ever until the end of time. But he loves you! He loves you and he needs money!"George Carlin 1937 - 2008

Many Paths, No God.

I don't go to church, I AM a church, for fuck's sake. I'm MINISTRY. --Al Jourgensen

Every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, “It is a matter of faith, and above reason.”- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

If life evolved, then there isn't anything left for God to do.

The universe is not fine-tuned for humanity. Humanity is fine-tuned to the universe. Victor Stenger

Skeptical theists choose to ride the trolley car of skepticism concerning the goods that God would know so as to undercut the evidential argument from evil. But once on that trolley car it may not be easy to prevent that skepticism from also undercutting any reasons they may suppose they have for thinking that God will provide them and the worshipful faithful with life everlasting in his presence. William Rowe

Unless you're one of those Easter-bunny vitalists who believes that personality results from some unquantifiable divine spark, there's really no alternative to the mechanistic view of human nature. Peter Watts

The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. E.O. Wilson

Creating humans who could understand the contrast between good and evil without subjecting them to eons of horrible suffering would be an utterly inconsequential matter for an omnipotent being. MM

The second commandment is "Thou shall not construct any graven images." Is this really the pinnacle of what we can achieve morally? The second most important moral principle for all the generations of humanity? It would be so easy to improve upon the 10 Commandments. How about "Try not to deep fry all of your food"? Sam Harris

Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody--not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms--had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would think--though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one--that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great

We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true--that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great

If atheism is a religion, then not playing chess is a hobby.

"Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything--anything--be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in." Sam Harris, The End of Faith, 36.

"Only a tiny fraction of corpsesfossilize, and we are lucky to have as many intermediate fossils as we do. We could easily have had no fossils at all, and still the evidence for evolution from other sources, such as molecular genetics and geographical distribution, would be overwhelmingly strong. On the other hand, evolution makes the strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the wrong geological stratum, the theory would be blown out of the water." Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 127.

One cannot take, "believing in X gives me hope, makes me moral, or gives me comfort," to be a reason for believing X. It might make me moral if I believe that I will be shot the moment I do something immoral, but that doesn't make it possible for me to believe it, or to take its effects on me as reasons for thinking it is true. Matt McCormick

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Top Ten Myths about Belief in God

1. Myth: Without God, life has no meaning.

There are 1.2 billion Chinese who have no predominant religion, and 1 billion people in India who are predominantly Hindu. And 65% of Japan's 127 million people claim to be non-believers. It is laughable to suggest that none of these billions of people are leading meaningful lives.

2. Myth: Prayer works.

Numerous studies have now shown that remote, blind, inter-cessionary prayer has no effect whatsoever of the health or well-being of subject's health, psychological states, or longevity. Furthermore, we have no evidence to support the view that people who wish fervently in their heads for things that they want get those things at any higher rate than people who do not.

3. Myth: Atheists are less decent, less moral, and overall worse people than believers.

There are hundreds of millions of non-believers on the planet living normal, decent, moral lives. They love their children, care about others, obey laws, and try to keep from doing harm to others just like everyone else. In fact, in predominately non-believing countries such as in northern Europe, measures of societal health such as life expectancy at birth, adult literacy, per capita income, education, homicide, suicide, gender equality, and political coercion are better than they are in believing societies.

4. Myth: Belief in God is compatible with the descriptions, explanations and products of science.

In the past, every supernatural or paranormal explanation of phenomena that humans believed turned out to be mistaken; science has always found a physical explanation that revealed that the supernatural view was a myth. Modern organisms evolved from lower life forms, they weren't created 6,000 years ago in the finished state. Fever is not caused by demon possession. Bad weather is not the wrath of angry gods. Miracle claims have turned out to be mistakes, frauds, or deceptions. So we have every reason to conclude that science will continue to undermine the superstitious worldview of religion.

5. Myth: We have immortal souls that survive the death of the body.

We have mountains of evidence that makes it clear that our consciousness, our beliefs, our desires, our thoughts all depend upon the proper functioning of our brains our nervous systems to exist. So when the brain dies, all of these things that we identify with the soul also cease to exist. Despite the fact that billions of people have lived and died on this planet, we do not have a single credible case of someone's soul, or consciousness, or personality continuing to exist despite the demise of their bodies. Allegations of spirit chandlers, psychics, ghost stories, and communications with the dead have all turned out to be frauds, deceptions, mistakes, and lies.

6. Myth: If there is no God, everything is permitted. Only belief in God makes people moral.

Consider the billions of people in China, India, and Japan above. If this claim was true, none of them would be decent moral people. So Ghandi, the Buddha, and Confucius, to name only a few were not moral people on this view, not to mention these other famous atheists: Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Aldous Huxley, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Carl Sagan, Bertrand Russell, Elizabeth Cady-Stanton, John Stuart Mill, Galileo, George Bernard Shaw, Gloria Steinam, James Madison, John Adams, and so on.

7. Myth: Believing in God is never a root cause of significant evil.

The counter examples of cases where it was someone's belief in God that was the direct justification for their perpetrated horrendous evils on humankind are too numerous to mention.

8. Myth: The existence of God would explain the origins of the universe and humanity.

All of the questions that allegedly plague non-God attempts to explain our origins--why are we here, where are we going, what is the point of it all, why is the universe here--still apply to the faux explanation of God. The suggestion that God created everything does not make it any clearer to us where it all came from, how he created it, why he created it, where it isall going. In fact, it raises even more difficult mysteries: how did God, operating outside the confines of space, time, and natural law "create" or "build" a universe that has physical laws? We have no precedent and maybe no hope of answering or understanding such a possibility. What does it mean to say that some disembodied, spiritual being who knows everything and has all power, "loves" us, or has thoughts, or goals, or plans? How could such a being have any sort of personal relationship with beings like us?

9. Myth: Even if it isn't true, there's no harm in my believing in God anyway.

People's religious views inform their voting, how they raise their children, what they think is moral and immoral, what laws and legislation they pass, who they are friends and enemies with, what companies they invest in, where they donate to charities, who they approve and disapprove of, who they are willing to kill or tolerate, what crimes they are willing to commit, and which wars they are willing to fight. How could any reasonable person think that religious beliefs are insignificant.

10: Myth: There is a God.

Common Criticisms of Atheism (and Why They’re Mistaken)

1. You can’t prove atheism.You can never prove a negative, so atheism requires as much faith as religion.

Atheists are frequently accosted with this accusation, suggesting that in order for non-belief to be reasonable, it must be founded on deductively certain grounds. Many atheists within the deductive atheology tradition have presented just those sorts of arguments, but those arguments are often ignored. But more importantly, the critic has invoked a standard of justification that almost none of our beliefs meet. If we demand that beliefs are not justified unless we have deductive proof, then all of us will have to throw out the vast majority of things we currently believe—oxygen exists, the Earth orbits the Sun, viruses cause disease, the 2008 summer Olympics were in China, and so on. The believer has invoked one set of abnormally stringent standards for the atheist while helping himself to countless beliefs of his own that cannot satisfy those standards. Deductive certainty is not required to draw a reasonable conclusion that a claim is true.

As for requiring faith, is the objection that no matter what, all positions require faith?Would that imply that one is free to just adopt any view they like?Religiousness and non-belief are on the same footing?(they aren’t).If so, then the believer can hardly criticize the non-believer for not believing. Is the objection that one should never believe anything on the basis of faith?Faith is a bad thing?That would be a surprising position for the believer to take, and, ironically, the atheist is in complete agreement.

2. The evidence shows that we should believe.

If in fact there is sufficient evidence to indicate that God exists, then a reasonable person should believe it. Surprisingly, very few people pursue this line as a criticism of atheism. But recently, modern versions of the design and cosmological arguments have been presented by believers that require serious consideration. Many atheists cite a range of reasons why they do not believe that these arguments are successful. If an atheist has reflected carefully on the best evidence presented for God’s existence and finds that evidence insufficient, then it’s implausible to fault them for irrationality, epistemic irresponsibility, or for being obviously mistaken.Given that atheists are so widely criticized, and that religious belief is so common and encouraged uncritically, the chances are good that any given atheist has reflected more carefully about the evidence.

3. You should have faith.

Appeals to faith also should not be construed as having prescriptive force the way appeals to evidence or arguments do. The general view is that when a person grasps that an argument is sound, that imposes an epistemic obligation of sorts on her to accept the conclusion. One person’s faith that God exists does not have this sort of inter-subjective implication. Failing to believe what is clearly supported by the evidence is ordinarily irrational. Failure to have faith that some claim is true is not similarly culpable. At the very least, having faith, where that means believing despite a lack of evidence or despite contrary evidence is highly suspect. Having faith is the questionable practice, not failing to have it.

4. Atheism is bleak, nihilistic, amoral, dehumanizing, or depressing.

These accusations have been dealt with countless times. But let’s suppose that they are correct. Would they be reasons to reject the truth of atheism? They might be unpleasant affects, but having negative emotions about a claim doesn’t provide us with any evidence that it is false. Imagine upon hearing news about the Americans dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki someone steadfastly refused to believe it because it was bleak, nihilistic, amoral, dehumanizing, or depressing. Suppose we refused to believe that there is an AIDS epidemic that is killing hundreds of thousands of people in Africa on the same grounds.

5.Atheism is bad for you.Some studies in recent years have suggested that people who regularly attend church, pray, and participate in religious activities are happier, live longer, have better health, and less depression.

First, these results and the methodologies that produced them have been thoroughly criticized by experts in the field.Second, it would be foolish to conclude that even if these claims about quality of life were true, that somehow shows that there is theism is correct and atheism is mistaken.What would follow, perhaps, is that participating in social events like those in religious practices are good for you, nothing more.There are a number of obvious natural explanations.Third, it is difficult to know the direction of the causal arrow in these cases.Does being religious result in these positive effects, or are people who are happier, healthier, and not depressed more inclined to participate in religions for some other reasons?Fourth, in a number of studies atheistic societies like those in northern Europe scored higher on a wide range of society health measures than religious societies.

Given that atheists make up a tiny proportion of the world’s population, and that religious governments and ideals have held sway globally for thousands of years, believers will certainly lose in a contest over “who has done more harm,” or “which ideology has caused more human suffering.”It has not been atheism because atheists have been widely persecuted, tortured, and killed for centuries nearly to the point of extinction.

Sam Harris has argued that the problem with these regimes has been that they became too much like religions.“Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag, and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.”

7.Atheists are harsh, intolerant, and hateful of religion.

Sam Harris has advocated something he calls “conversational intolerance.”For too long, a confusion about religious tolerance has led people to look the other way and say nothing while people with dangerous religious agendas have undermined science, the public good, and the progress of the human race.There is no doubt that people are entitled to read what they choose, write and speak freely, and pursue the religions of their choice.But that entitlement does not guarantee that the rest of us must remain silent or not verbally criticize or object to their ideas and their practices, especially when they affect all of us.Religious beliefs have a direct affect on who a person votes for, what wars they fight, who they elect to the school board, what laws they pass, who they drop bombs on, what research they fund (and don’t), which social programs they fund (and don’t), and a long list of other vital, public matters.Atheists are under no obligation to remain silent about those beliefs and practices that urgently need to be brought into the light and reasonably evaluated.

Real respect for humanity will not be found by indulging your neighbor’s foolishness, or overlooking dangerous mistakes.Real respect is found in disagreement.The most important thing we can do for each other is disagree vigorously and thoughtfully so that we can all get closer to the truth.

8.Science is as much a religious ideology as religion is.

At their cores, religions and science have a profound difference.The essence of religion is sustaining belief in the face of doubts, obeying authority, and conforming to a fixed set of doctrines.By contrast, the most important discovery that humans have ever made is the scientific method.The essence of that method is diametrically opposed to religious ideals:actively seek out disconfirming evidence.The cardinal virtues of the scientific approach are to doubt, analyze, critique, be skeptical, and always be prepared to draw a different conclusion if the evidence demands it.